• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Detroit Free Press Marta Salij Books Column: MARTA SALIJ: Little Rebels

Posted on: Sunday, 26 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Marta Salij, Detroit Free Press

Mar. 26--Satire is a tricky business. What if you pick on something that isn't laughable? What if you can't make people laugh?

Worse: What if your satire is so subtle nobody gets it?

Mike Heppner's second novel, "Pike's Folly," is all about subtlety, both in what the story explores and in how Heppner lampoons that. His characters traffic in transgressions so small that they might not seem like transgressions at all, at least not to us observers.

But they're trying to break the rules, make something new, shock the neighbors. And that's a momentous undertaking in any life -- even if the results might at first seem laughable.

Gazillionaire as flamethrower

The Pike of the title is Nathaniel Pike, a self-made gazillionaire -- Heppner's phrase -- in Rhode Island, a state so small it has only one other gazillionaire, Gregg Reese. Naturally, they are opposites.

Reese is Old Money, which means he heads his family's philanthropic foundation, which means he has his mother peering over his shoulder to make sure he's holding up the Reese traditions. The Reeses give money to worthy causes, which they actually call "worthy causes." Gregg Reese is always having to show up to the ribbon-cutting of yet another Reese wing to a hospital, etc.

Pike, though, is New Money, and he sees himself as a flamethrower. New Money often does, seemingly unaware that the maverick entrepreneur persona is as cliched as the stodgy philanthropist one.

How to be a kicky, crazy flamethrowin' gazillionaire, when flying on the space shuttle and around the world in a hot-air balloon have already been tried? Pike decides to buy a few acres of New Hampshire federal wilderness, miles from any town or road, and pave them.

My, how Pike amuses himself with "this silly image of a pristine parking lot consigned to the rocky barrens of the White Mountains, never driven upon, each pointless parking space meticulously detailed in bold yellow lines, waiting for no one, an affront and an insult and a fantastic jest."

The pursuit of this fantastic jest brings in more chafing-at-the rules characters, such as the Interior Department bureaucrat who decides that being a downtrodden bureaucrat is punishment enough and he should be compensated better for his Kafka-esque existence.

And how about Pike's assistant, a writer with one novel to his credit? Stuart had thought his novel would quake the literary world, but it turned out to be so predictable in its avant-gardeness that only his wife seems to have read it.

Which brings us to Stuart's wife, Marlene. Marlene yearns to free herself from her self-imposed shackles, the ones that keep her in her dull job as a bank teller. She, too, wants to throw flames.

So she decides to take her clothes off. Like, all the time.

Listen carefully as Heppner describes one of her early attempts at streaking, which gets her as far as her backyard:

"Easing the door open, she placed one foot on the wet brick patio, then continued a few steps away from the house. Stuart followed but stopped where the light from a street lamp fell at his feet. He didn't feel safe out here. The area behind the house was enclosed by a six-foot-high fence that ran along the perimeter of the yard. Above the fence, the second and third floors of the neighbor's house lurked behind a thicket of bare trees."

Small follies playing out

Now, what kind of a risk is that? A few steps outside the house? In the dark?

I think how Heppner handles Marlene's story is a clue to reading all of "Pike's Folly."

It's easy to scorn someone who thinks that streaking is a brave, transgressive act on the order of, say, standing up to a tyrant. That would be satire as we've become accustomed.

But Heppner doesn't mock Marlene, or Stuart, or Pike, or the other half-dozen people involved in the parking lot.

Rather, Heppner allows their follies to play themselves out, with no piling on. The follies may be ridiculous, but to be a human is to be ridiculous, to want small things so badly and yet to be afraid to go after them.

A novelist -- Heppner -- would know this, as he shows in one of Stuart's reveries:

"When he thought of what writers actually did with their time, the ratio of the number of beautiful, meaningful, valuable words that they'd left on the page to the minutes and hours that they'd spent simply existing, it depressed him."

With "Pike's Folly," Heppner takes the better road of satire: subtle, humane -- and therefore true.

-----

Copyright (c) 2006, Detroit Free Press

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: Detroit Free Press

More News in this Category